Finally freed from his brother's shadow

Victoria Glendinning reviews Wilfred Owen by Dominic Hibberd

"The pity of war, the pity war distilled." Most people nowadays think of Wilfred Owen as the archetypal poet of the First World War, but when he died, aged 25, he was virtually unknown. Although his friend Siegfried Sassoon published the first collection of the war poems in 1920, the real upsurge of interest in him came in the 1960s, due to the Vietnam War and to Benjamin Britten's magical use of his words in The War Requiem; it is impossible now to hear those poems without also hearing Britten's music, and vice versa.

In his lifetime, Owen published only five poems, two of them in the house magazine of Craiglockhart, the hospital where he was treated for shell shock. The great poems, written within a short space of time, are based on his experiences of five months in 1917, of which only about 30 horrific days were in action on the Western Front. For six weeks he was in hospital, and for four, away on a course.

He was badly concussed on the battlefield, and shortly afterwards briefly unconscious when a shell exploded close to him. Feverish, confused, trembling, incapable, he was sent back home. His Craiglockhart doctor believed in inducing abreaction - forcing his patients to relive the horrors, in order to exorcise them. Owen was encouraged to write it all out. He had been writing already for several years; much of the language and imagery of the canonical war poems was already there in his earlier efforts. What fired his creative spurt was getting to know Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow patient, and more sophisticated both as a man and as a writer. Owen hero-worshipped him, and adopted Sassoon's critical values and attitudes in regard both to poetry and to the politicians' conduct of the war. Convalescing on leave in London, he was made much of by established writers and literary men whom he met through Sassoon: Robert Ross, Eddie Marsh, Robert Graves, Osbert Sitwell. Charles Scott Moncrieff was (unrequitedly) in love with him. Owen went back to the front more mature, fighting fit, and in high spirits. He had everything to look forward to now.

He was the eldest of four children, and his mother, an extremely religious woman, idolised him. The near-erotic warmth of her love both sheltered and shackled him. Both sides of his family were, over many generations, tradesmen and shopkeepers; his father was a railway clerk, and the family lived in Birkenhead and then Shrewsbury. Owen left school early and went to work as a pupil-teacher - a system that produced most of the staff of elementary schools. While studying in the hope of getting a degree, he took a position as a live-in "parish assistant" to a vicar - an unutterably dreary period of supervising mothers' meetings and Bible classes, his only pleasure the companionship of the village children - "fraternity, paternity and amativeness all in one". He failed to get into university, and also lost his faith, or most of it.

Very sensibly he buggered off to France, where he taught English at a Berlitz School and then did private tutoring with pleasant and cultivated families. He was good-looking and athletic (though only five feet, five inches tall) and a favourite with the girls. However, "all women, without exception, annoy me", he wrote to his mother, which must have annoyed her. His sexuality was a secret torment. War broke out while he was in France, and in October 1915 he joined up.

Related Articles

Owen's story has been told before. But early editors and biographers had to work under the shadow of his resentful younger brother Harold, who in his three-volume Journey from Obscurity left a portrait of Wilfred as a pious, aloof, secretive and altogether rather unpleasant boy, who became transformed into a heroic figure once he donned a uniform. Harold also exercised a brutal censorship, controlling publications, cutting or blotting out many passages in his brother's letters, and destroying as many as he defaced. What Harold was afraid of was any suggestion that the family was working-class (which it was) or that Wilfred was gay (which he was) or that Wilfred was a coward (which he emphatically was not) rather than a casualty. In Dominic Hibberd's book, poor old Harold gets his comeuppance.

Hibberd has been writing about Owen, his poetry, and his contemporaries for three decades, and was the fourth editor of the war poems. He writes with a simplicity of heart and mind that fits well with his subject, this "endearing, sometimes pretentious young versifier, self-absorbed, class-conscious and pedantic" who grew into "a fiercely compassionate, deeply impressive man". Hibberd's text is thickened, like a stew, with topographical, genealogical and sociological context, linked to the narrative by suppositions and speculations about what Owen actually knew or saw or did. The reader may glimpse, between the lines, crammed files of notes, and crates piled high with material gathered over years. The course of the war and the detail of battles are recounted in a detail that Owen certainly never knew. This is a good, honest, and often moving biography; it is also a monument to research.

Hibberd states that "writing about his death was an ordeal that I put off for many weeks". But his account of that death is a triumph of minimalism, unique in the book. It has nothing to do, ultimately, with all that research, and everything to do with respect and perhaps love. It happens unexpectedly in mid-paragraph, as violent deaths do. If an attempted canal crossing had been called off 10 minutes sooner, 2nd Lieut Owen would not have been shot as he strove with his men to repair a shelled bridge. The war ended six days later, on the very day that his family received the telegram.